Concern About Sustainability Is Almost As Old and Enduring As the Dismal Science Itself

Concern about sustainability is almost as old and enduring as the dismal science itself

1798, Malthus,1865, Jevons, In 1952, the President’s Materials Policy Commission (1952) In 1972, Meadows and others The Limits to Growth.

response from mainstream economists, especially Dasgupta and Heal (1974), Solow (1974), and Stiglitz (1974).

An even earlier starting point would include the seminal papers by Krutilla (1967) on long-term environmental valuation with irreversibility – also asymmetry of technology (fabrication v. amenities)

the sequel to Solow’s 1974 paper was from Hartwick (1977): “Intergenerational Equity and the Investing of Rents from Exhaustible Resources.”

Krautkremer 1985, direct consumption and environmental values

Barbier (1987) presents an early illustration of the oft-repeated but sometimes ill-defined idea that environmental sustainability, economic sustainability, and social sustainability are separate but interlinked concepts

“sustainable development involves a process of trade-offs among the various goals of [biological, economic, and social] systems”

***In “Toward Some Operational Principles of Sustainable Development,” Daly (1990) highlights three intuitively appealing and memorable rules that are “obvious principles of sustainable development” (pp. 2, 4):

• Harvest rates should equal regeneration rates (sustained yield).

• Waste emission rates should equal the natural assimilative capacities of the ecosystems into which the wastes are emitted.

• Renewable energy sources should be exploited in a quasi-sustainable manner by limiting their rate of depletion to the rate of creation of substitutes for those renewable resources.

“Economics and ‘Sustainability:’ Balancing Trade-offs and Imperatives” (Toman 1994)

“safe minimum standard of preservation” idea developed by Ciriacy-Wantrup (1952) and Bishop (1978): ethical norms become increasingly important complements to trade-off analyses as the stakes rise

Solow (1993), on the other hand, vigorously defends more conventional reasoning on sustainability. Solow argues in effect that if care is taken to internalize resource market inefficiencies and environmental externalities, and if society does not discount the future too much, then a sustainable allocation of resources—natural capital and otherwise—can result.

Howarth and Norgaard: “Environmental Valuation under Sustainable Development” (1992). Implications for environmental valuation – social cost of carbon.

“Towards an Ecological Economics of Sustainability” (Common and Perrings 1992), which aims to show how the concept of ecological sustainability is very different from that of economic sustainability. The former involves resilience, conceived of as stability of the parameters defining an ecological–economic system

Measuring Sustainability: A Time Series of Alternative Indicators for Scotland” (Hanley and others 1999).

sustainability - what it is, who decides what it is, and how that decision is made, continue to bedevil analysts of all stripes—just as similar questions about individual and social responsibility have been torments for millennia

Assignment for next week – find papers and be prepared to discuss 2000 – 2017 empirical analyses of sustainability in Caribbean.